THE GOLDEN RULE OF CBT

By David Dehaas

The ultimate test of computer based training, or CBT as it’s usually called, is really quite simple. If you’re trying to decide whether or not a given product that someone is trying to sell you is a good one, and if it will work for you in your workplace, get the demo disk or the actual product on loan, pop it in the CD drive on your computer and see if you can stand to go through the whole thing.

If the training bores you beyond endurance and you just can’t finish it, don’t subject your poor long-suffering employees to the ordeal. If it strikes you as trivial and stupid, it probably is. If you find yourself muttering "yeah, yeah, get on with it" and the rigid interface forces you to navigate by circuitous and frustrating routes, forget about it. And if the multiple-choice questions in the review or self-test sections are set up so that anyone can guess the right answers, reach for the "eject disk" button.

On the other hand, if you find yourself drawn in and enjoying the experience, if you find yourself admiring how things are explained, if it runs so smoothly that you’re oblivious to the mechanics of the program, if it seems to sense where you need to go next and, most of all, if you actually learn something from the experience, it’s starting to look like you have a winner worth investing in. (And remember, you’re investing a great deal more than just the cost of the product. You’re investing employee training time, you’re investing their future performance and you just might be investing their safety.)

WHAT IT CAN DO

Can computer based training do the job? That may seem like a subjective or essentially unanswerable question, but it’s not. There are hard and fast guidelines for deciding whether or not a given type of training -- or learning experience -- can achieve a given desired outcome.

Educational theorists divide the broad concept of "learning" into three separate areas or "domains". It actually makes a good deal of sense, and it’s very helpful to examine training in terms of each of the domains.

Psychomotor domain: This is the area of physical skills, such as riding a bicycle, hitting a baseball or the mechanics of playing the violin. Psychomotor skills involve complex and coordinated use of muscles and interaction with the senses. The skills are stored somewhere in the subconscious part of the brain; you don’t "know" how to ride a bicycle, you couldn’t explain "how" you do it, yet you can do it. Some of the skills are easy and quickly learned, some of them are immensely difficult and take years.

The only way to learn psychomotor skills is to practice the activity over and over again until you start to get the hang of it. It’s strictly hands-on. In the early stages of learning a skill, it is helpful for someone to explain how to start, what to do, what not to do and so on; but only physical practice will allow you to learn a physical skill.

CBT, for all intents and purposes, can’t teach you a physical skill.

Affective domain: Next there is the "affective" domain, the one that deals with our attitudes toward a given thing, person or subject. How you feel about hearing protection, whether you take the lockout procedure seriously, or whether or not you think it’s important to report near misses are all in the affective domain. Clearly, attitude is of extreme importance in any kind of training: If people know how to do something, understand the concepts perfectly and yet think the whole thing is a silly bunch of nonsense, they will not act on their skills and knowledge -- and the training will have been meaningless.

Attitude is learned, usually from other people, but it can also be formed by our subjective interpretation of our past experiences (in which case we often call it "prejudice" rather than attitude). However, in a perfect world, we would all base our attitude on the facts rather than on our prejudices or those of others around us. In a perfect world.

CBT, with the learner sitting in front of a computer monitor by himself or herself, interacting with the program, can have some limited bearing on the affective domain. In other words, it can change attitudes. By presenting the facts on hearing loss, for example, a CBT program can make a learner realize that hearing loss is serious, that it is cumulative and that it is incurable. Those facts can trickle down from the conscious mind to the unconscious and change the learner’s attitude about hearing protection and the hearing protection policy: Gosh, if I’d known it was this serious, I’d have worn my ear muffs all the time. (And I’ll make sure I wear them from now on.)

Whether or not the information in a CBT program has a chance to change attitudes depends a great deal on the credibility of how the information is presented. If it seems mature and in touch with the real world, learners will tend to trust it. (If it’s clever, humorous, ironic and over the edge -- all things that traditional trainers consider taboo -- it will have a much better chance of establishing its credibility and being taken seriously.) However, if it’s dull, boring and "Eddy the Safety Elephant says always read the MSDS..." then it’s more likely to reinforce negative attitudes rather than creating new, positive ones.

So, in short, CBT can change attitudes if it provides useful information in a mature, real-world and perhaps even entertaining fashion.

Cognitive domain: The cognitive domain is where knowledge and understanding reside in the mind. It consists of facts that can be recalled: The flash point of a liquid is the temperature at which it gives off enough vapour to be ignited in a standard test. That’s knowledge. Facts. A good thing to have handy on a test. Understanding, on the other hand, is an appreciation for the significance of the facts, the ability to combine various facts into a working model, and the ability to draw conclusions from them.

Combine the factual knowledge about flash point with more factual knowledge about the fire code, and one should be able to draw a conclusion about how the solvent should be stored in the warehouse.

CBT can be very good at teaching facts and it should be reasonably good at creating understanding. Should be. But it is very much a double-edged sword. Many CBT products consist of little more than facts, and many test or review sections focus on the regurgitation of those facts; but being able to choose the "correct" facts in a multiple-choice test has very little bearing on learning and the overall effectiveness of the training.

Learning facts is useful only insofar as the facts form the basis of understanding -- and it’s understanding that forms the basis of future action. This means that CBT (as well as virtually every other kind of training) should be assessed on the basis of whether or not it instills understanding that will change behaviour.

The proof of this particular pudding lies in the structure of the test or review-question sections. Avoid programs that lean too heavily on testing knowledge of facts; look for programs that test understanding by presenting case-study scenarios full of facts and asking the learner to draw appropriate conclusions.

Of course, virtually all learning is a combination of all three domains: All learning involves some factual knowledge (and the need to understand it), some psychomotor skills and varying degrees of attitudinal change. (Riding a bicycle, for example, requires primarily psychomotor skills; but you also need cognitive knowledge of the rules of the road, and it will take a good attitude to obey them.)

So it’s important to examine what you want the CBT program to achieve. Do you want to teach a skill? Change an attitude? Or impart knowledge and understanding? CBT is essentially unsuitable for skills training; it is at best so-so when it comes to changing attitudes; and it is well suited to imparting knowledge and understanding. But your first best test of the suitability of any CBT product is still the obvious one: Try it and see if you like it.

There are many other questions to ask about any CBT program. Here are three of the most important ones.

* Does the computer based training run properly on your system? Whether the program is CD based, loaded onto your internal network or even if it’s accessed via password from the Internet, make sure your equipment is fully compatible with the CBT. (Many CBT programs have audio and live-action video clips that not all desktop computers can run without special hardware and software.)

* Does the CBT program make full use of its medium? CBT should be far more than just a handbook transplanted onto a computer. It should use audio and video, and it should use the available computing power to provide depth and choices. Learners should be able to find more information if they need it (if the program picks up a wrong choice in a review question, of if the learner requests it by clicking on a "more info" button or a hot link) and other users should be able to bypass information they don’t need without getting bogged down.

* Will it work for a variety of learners? Some CBT programs consist of screen after screen of text, others use an active mix of audio, graphics and text. The latter is preferable not just because it’s more interesting, but because different people learn in different ways. Some people gain information best by hearing it, some by reading it and others by seeing it visually represented with graphics. While each of us has a primary learning style, all of us benefit greatly from receiving information by all three routes.

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